1 the Deceivingest Fellow: David T. Hines and the Crisis of Southern

The Deceivingest Fellow: David T. Hines and the Crisis of Southern Honor Lawrence T. McDonnell Iowa State University Villain, fraud, hypocrite, imposter, scoundrel: just about everyone in antebellum America knew Dave, or thought they did.1 Almost no one saw him coming. Some few suffered for that error in a financial sense. Many more railed against his casual misappropriation of friendship, propinquity, identity, honor. Nearly all men and women on the eve of the Civil War had learned to scan any social situation, reading action as melodrama and penetrating to the heart of falsehood.2 Or getting flummoxed and fleeced and starting over again, a little wiser, perhaps. Yet historians have read the record with shocking carelessness, letting the good doctor slip away clean—not a trace or mention of David Theodosius Hines in all his various monkeyshines shows up anywhere in the scholarly literature.3 From “notorious” to nothing is quite a come-down, especially for a fellow who (maybe) wrote not one, but two captivating autobiographies.4 Dave’s contemporaries we can excuse: they were honestly hoodwinked. But how academics have managed to miss every clue to the existence of a man who threw the cultural identity of the nation into both pleasant and pestiferous confusion over the course of decades is 1 This essay is derived from a larger project in progress, Chasing Dave: the Unbelievable World of an American Scoundrel. For advice and criticism, I am indebted to Kathleen Hilliard, Vernon Burton, John Mayfield, and the late Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Please do not quote, cite or circulate this essay without permission. 2 The classic study is Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982). See also Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, 1990); Lynn M. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, 2004). 3 The only book which mentions Hines is a tourist-oriented paperback, which gets his story and much else quite wrong. Mark R. Jones, Wicked Charleston: The Dark Side of the Holy City (Charleston, 2005), 69. 4 Hines was a famous fellow throughout the nation, “well-known” in the South Carolina lowcountry by 1831, and referred to as “notorious” in nearly every newspaper account of his antics by decade’s end. See, e.g., (Columbia, S. C.) Southern Times and State Gazette, May 28, 1831; (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, November 23, 1839. 1 another story. The life and career of David T. Hines tells much about the contradictions of honor and identity at the heart of southern society, and perhaps as much about the way we write history now.5 Myself, I guess I met Dave twice—or heard of him, at least--before I wondered if we had crossed paths at all. That was a common reaction before the Civil War, too. Three decades ago, to no direct purpose, I copied down the record of David T. Hines’ 1831 bankruptcy petition, stored in a file box in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, along with dozens of other pleas of like kind.6 It was nothing special: Hines was a landless fellow too deep in debt in a rural Charleston neighborhood appropriately called Scuffletown. By rights, he should have sunk into personal oblivion in the swamp of note cards I was amassing. So many others did. Somehow or other, though, that last-century long-hand form of research inscribed in my brain a dim memory, so that when—years later—the arrest of “Dr. Hines” for “Negro stealing” in Louisiana in 1840 showed up on a microfilm newspaper reel far from my initial point of contact, something pre-consciously clicked with me.7 Were these two guys one? That was the way history used to be done. I remember when. From there, slow but sure, my scholar-as-detective quest turned up treasure: scattered 5 In her brilliant study of the murder of the New York prostitute Helen Jewett, for example, Patricia Cohen wonders about the identity of her victim’s lover-doctor, who was quite probably Hines. Although she explores the case with extreme care, she overlooks evidence linking Jewett to the Kentucky-born counterfeiter Monroe Edwards, who was Hines’ sometime confederate. The consequence is that she misses Hines’ account of Jewett’s three-month excursion to Charleston, just before her death in 1836. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York, 1998), esp. 105-108; Authentic Biography of the Late Helen Jewett, A Girl of the Town, who was Murdered on the 10th of April, 1836: Together with a Full and Accurate Statement of the Circumstances Connected with that Event, by a Gentleman Fully Acquainted with her History (New York, 1836); H. R. Howard and George Wilkes, The Lives of Helen Jewett, and Richard P. Robinson (New York, 1849); Life and Adventures of the Accomplished Forger and Swindler, Colonel Monroe Edwards (New York, 1848); Life and Adventures of Dr. David T. Hines. A Narrative of Thrilling Interest and Most Stirring Scenes of his Eventful Life (Charleston, 1852). 6 Petition of David T. Hines, October 16, 1833, Petitions and Schedules of Insolvent Debtors, Records of the Court of Common Pleas, Charleston County, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. See also (Columbia, S. C.) Columbia Telescope, May 27, 1831. 7 (Augusta, Ga.) Augusta Chronicle, June 12, 1840. 2 newspaper notes and encounters in manuscript collections at first—pure needle-in-haystack stuff—then full-blown memoirs hiding in plain sight, widely advertised in 1840 and 1852, and still widely available—if anyone cared to look. How, at a time when southern cultural and intellectual history was enjoying a remarkable resurgence, had I—we--missed those astonishing texts for so long?8 Working through thousands of manuscript collections in scores of libraries across dozens of years while pursuing rather larger matters than an increasingly unordinary con man, I kept bumping into Dave (I thought) by chance. A robbery, a flight, prison again! Surely there were many more instances where he pulled down his hat and passed me by, unnoticed. “It is a pity that Dave is such a rascal,” Charleston’s Peter Porcher declared in 1839, for he seemed altogether honorable, “generous and disinterested.”9 The trouble was, his every word and gesture was a sham, the all-too-realistic performance of “the deceivingest fellow you ever did see.”10 Dressed to the nines, graced with faultless manners, portraying an attractively cool, manly demeanor on the day they met at a Tennessee mountain resort, Hines was worlds away from his humble origins as an overseer’s son on Porcher’s uncle’s plantation.11 No wonder he fooled so many for so much for so long, striding across the years as both scoundrel and hero— quite a new kind of trickster—and caused such confusion and sly admiration on the eve of disunion. His cleverness, my stupidity, and the vast mountains of manuscripts, newspapers, and public records which might possibly contain a clue to Hines’s perambulations conspired to 8Imagine, for example, how a fellow like Dave might complicate and enliven a work such as Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 2004). 9 Peter C. Porcher to Elizabeth S. Porcher, April 29, 1839, Peter Cordes Porcher Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, S. C. [hereinafter cited as SCHS]. 10 Peter C. Porcher to Elizabeth S. Porcher, May 12, 1839, Peter Cordes Porcher Papers, SCHS. 11 [Richard Hrabowski, comp.], Directory for the District of Charleston Comprising the Places of Residence and Occupation of the White Inhabitants of the Following Parishes…. (Charleston, 1809). 3 ensure that I’d never know much about the man or his meaning—or could ever know that I knew—by proceeding as I had.12 But then, about five years back, digitization hit in a big way, and the roof fell in for old Dave.13 Now it is abundantly clear how much trouble one shameless fellow made for a society rooted in an ethos of honor. We can see Dave better now, a man of “small stature” and “pale complexion,” riding “a fine bay mare of great fleetness” steadily away from his home in St. Stephen’s Parish, his “short brown coat” and “drab pantaloons” flapping in the breeze.14 Others constructed this scene as a “well-known” rogue’s flight from justice; Dave considered it a decisive moment in a manly, heroic quest to realize personal ambition and win the honor “evil forces” had long denied him.15 Or so he said. Carolinians in 1831 thought he was headed to Georgia or Mississippi—still mostly wild west and up for grabs—but soon he sailed straight up north, trading his “leather cap” for a beaver hat. The game was on.16 From 1831 to 1864, David Hines travelled all over the eastern United States, from Galveston, Mobile, and New Orleans to St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Saratoga Springs, pulsing 12 Cf., the variant approaches to this problem of Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York, 1978); Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 2001); Scott R. Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend (New York, 2006). 13 Websites such as Ancestry, Genealogybank, Fold3, Gale’s American Nineteenth-Century Newspapers and others are transforming the way scholars write history “from the bottom up.” The potential scholarly misuse of these sites is enormous—just a few clicks provides a passable veneer of research which can be slapped upon a boilerplate of secondary sources and, voila, we have scholarly innovation.

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